Russian historian is Harvard bound

Dr. Maria Galmarini in front of Cleveland Hall, where her JMU office is located.

Earning a prestigious
postdoctoral fellowship at Harvard University has mapped the next academic year
for Dr. Maria Cristina Galmarini to do what she loves best – writing.

Galmarini, an assistant
professor of history completing her first year of teaching Russian and world
history at James Madison University, is one of six scholars to receive
fellowships from the Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies at Harvard
University. Chosen from a field of 192 applicants, the fellowship winners will
participate in the Davis Center’s 2013-14 program, which focuses on the theme
of Subjectivities and Identities in Eurasia. While she will spend most of her
time at Harvard writing, she and her colleagues will participate in weekly fellowship
seminars that are open to graduate students.

Galmarini will write a book
manuscript, "The 'Right To Be Helped': Entitlement and Marginalization in
Soviet Russia (1917-1950)," based on her research interests on the rights
of marginalized peoples in the former Soviet Union and other socialist
countries.

The fellowship will allow her
to write "a complete rehaul" of her dissertation, focusing on a
different set of questions to result in "a more mature product," she
said. "I decided to take the hardest path and completely rewrite my
dissertation. It will be about the same topic and it will be based partially on
the same archival materials, the same evidence, but by restructuring the whole
project, I am focusing on a different set of arguments."

"I'm going to focus more
on the tension between vulnerable social groups' sense of entitlement to social
rights and the reality of marginalization and how the sense of entitlement and
outcomes of marginalization actually mutually grow into each other."

For example, Galmarini
explained, in the early Soviet Stalinist period a man with disabilities
claiming the right to social assistance also had to portray himself as a "deserving
other." By doing that, this was reinforcing his marginalization, his
condition of need.

Teaching JMU undergraduates
affected Galmarini’s decision to "rehaul" her dissertation.
"When you teach you have to motivate students, you have to let them feel
why it matters. Why it matters to talk about a single mother in 1922 in a
little village in the Ural Mountains. Why do we need to care about her?
Teaching really helps with that, with understanding the stakes."

Galmarini’s path to teaching
Russian history followed a circuitous route that included earning a bachelor’s
degree in Russian and German languages and literatures at the Catholic
University of the Sacred Heart in her native Milan, Italy. "I really loved
consuming Russian poetry and prose," Galmarini said. The first decade of
the 21st century, a politically changeable time in the former Eastern Bloc,
piqued her interest and academic research in historical questions, leading her
to complete advanced degrees at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign,
where she earned an M.A. in Russian studies and a Ph.D. in history.

Galmarini will deconstruct
her dissertation, which is based on four case studies of "non-economically
active" people, the term used in the literature on social protection and
social welfare to describe individuals needing government assistance, such as
individuals with disabilities, unemployed single mothers and problematic minors.

"I'm going to tell a
story now," Galmarini said. The book manuscript will be divided into two
sections, one introducing the characters and agencies that assist – "agents
and subjects of help" – with the other exploring the "evolution of
help."

World Wars I and II
immeasurably affected the European welfare environment as human casualties of
the conflicts forced governments to question rights and resources.

"There are two
principles that underpin states' understanding of social rights,"
Galmarini said. "One is contribution. You have to contribute somehow."
For instance, individuals pay for healthcare insurance by buying it
independently or by laboring for an employer who covers the premiums.

"But there is also the
principle of need and suffering and hardship that's more difficulty to quantify,"
the professor said. "But it is very much part of every modern welfare
system that I looked at. This means that modern states realize that there are
layers of the population who do not contribute in monetary terms, in productive
terms. These layers of the population cannot be excluded because they would
create a burden for the state itself in the end. So every modern state has to
find ways to care for these unproductive members of society. How modern states
do that changes over time and space."

"I don't propose
solutions in my book," cautioned Galmarini, "but it's a think piece
that I wish decision makers might read and think through it. I think it is one
of my duties as an intellectual to present broad issues to broad audiences."